This 5xCD box set from Cherry Red offers a compelling look at shoegaze's prime era. Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality.
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Like band names, genre terms usually lose their literal meaning once they get established. Just as the corny reference of "My Bloody Valentine" was wiped away by the band’s might and majesty, "shoegaze" became a phonetically evocative word—those oozy vowels and soft sibilants—that suited the blurry sound. The literal meaning—and the fact that it was initially intended as a derisive term— disappeared.
The compressed accusation in "shoegaze"—coined by someone at NME, a music paper less supportive of the genre than its rival Melody Maker—is that these were bands too bashful to meet the audience’s eyes. Unlike the attention-seeking egos that typically front British bands, the shoegazers were self-effacing, hiding behind their hair and glancing down at the array of effects pedals at their feet. Shoegazers were insufficiently invested in the performative aspects of rock: the genre was all about sound, not show.
Despite starting as a slur, "shoegaze" fit the genre like a glove and soon supplanted the competing descriptors. "Dreampop," an invention of A.R. Kane’s, enjoyed small and short-lived currency in the U.S. The other contender was The Scene That Celebrates Itself, coined by a Melody Maker editor. A tautology, of course—show me a Scene That Denigrates Itself—but it did convey the incestuous vibe of the early movement. Most of the bands knew each other and fraternized, and they generally hailed from the Thames Valley (London, Reading, Oxford).
Remembering shoegaze’s other name made me think of Brian Eno’s "scenius" concept: the idea that music evolves through collective processes, in an incremental and reactive way, rather than through heroic innovators making giant steps that everyone else follows. A sound emerges and everyone wants in; the style—usually a mixture of new technological possibilities and aesthetic choices—becomes the idiom through which you express what you have to say. Like all languages, the style stipulates and restricts possibilities as much as it creates them.
The first few discs of Still in a Dream, a new 5xCD box from Cherry Red, make a good argument in favor of scenius. Picking almost randomly, one example of the perfectly generic here is Pale Saints' "Sight of You." It is not ur-shoegaze (that would be MBV’s "You Made Me Realise"), but it is echt-shoegaze. The name Pale Saints vaguely gestures at the Pre-Raphaelites and mystic devotion; the song title proposes love as a rapture of the gaze rather than a fever of the flesh; the sound is choirboy-pure vocals and guitar that works as a billowing curtain of texture rather than propulsive riff. Two other absolutely typical, absolutely lovely specimens of shoegaze here are Lush’s "De-Luxe" (like being buffeted by flower petals in a wind-tunnel) and Slowdive’s "Slowdive," where the slightest of chord sequences ripples the silvery guitar wooze. Where the genre’s progenitors My Bloody Valentine—mystifyingly absent from the box despite providing its title—churned with dizzy-making desire, the effect with second-wave shoegaze tends to be more virginal. Slowdive certainly emit none of the dark erotic energy of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song from which they took their name.
Along with "scenius," another Eno thought sprang to mind when listening through the box: Eno hailed MBV’s "Soon" as "the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." That got me musing: why would "vague" be a good thing for music to be? How would you distinguish between the deliberately indistinct and the merely insubstantial? And how does this sonic vagueness relate to life?
Shoegaze’s nebulousness has to do with its slightly "off" relation with both rock and pop. The genre fetishizes the sound of the guitar, but is relatively uninterested in the other things that guitars have traditionally done—riffs, solos, grooving. Shoegaze introduced a new generation of guitar heroes who weren’t dramatic. Rather than the spotlight of a solo, there would be a mid-song caesura of abstract carnage. The heroism took the form of explorations into texture. Kevin Shields was the scene's Hendrix figure, but the contrast between Jimi the showman and Shields the shy man is telling. No guitar-face or swaggering about the stage. The music was designed to overwhelm in the live context, but in a way that was impersonal—as though the band were victims of the sound as much as the audience, or simply conduits for the torrential noise.
What also made shoegaze such an indeterminate proposition as regards proper rock and proper pop was the way it used rhythm and the voice. It’s tempting to say that this is a genre consisting of non-drummers and non-singers. Certainly, re-listening to Ride’s "Drive Blind" was a bit of a shocker: how did a group get so big with such a shaky voice upfront, with a drummer that could barely hold a beat? But mostly the subdued rhythm and buried vocals was a deliberate aesthetic choice rather than a matter of deficiency. Voices were mixed to be half-obscured by the blizzard of sound; the rhythm section just about kept up with the guitar tumult. Shoegaze was as not-quite-pop as it was not-quite-rock. The melodies harked back beguilingly to a hazy, half-remembered '60s, but had little to do with what '80s chart-pop considered "a tune." Shoegaze’s brief stint as the reigning alternative sound in the UK was ended by Britpop, and it’s the emphasis on "pop" there that is significant. Groups like Oasis and Blur mixed the voice upfront and above the instrumentation; songs acquired anthemic choruses; singers got cocky and in-your-face.
Shoegaze, in contrast, made a fetish of the swoon. The sighing vocals, the sickly drooping drones and melodic descents, the wavery timbres—these signature sonic effects induced listener responses like rolling your eyes back in your head or swaying slightly as if about to faint. The feeling transmitted by shoegaze at its most compelling combined surging urgency and heavy-lidded languor. It suggested threshold states: drowsily slipping into a nap in the mid-afternoon, not being able to shake off the dream in the morning. The connective thread with all these sensations is the relinquishing of control, the scary bliss of losing orientation and agency.
I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to imagine that this had some kind of semi-conscious resonance for a generation that felt powerless. It’s quite hard to reconstruct how bleak things seemed in the late '80s and early '90s; in both Britain and America, conservative governments were in third-term ascendance, and mainstream popular culture from hair metal to Hollywood seemed be in sync with the rightward shift. For many—not all, but many—this encouraged resignation, a withdrawal verging on hibernation. That’s why American nu-punks L7 wrote their anti-slacker anthem "Pretend We’re Dead" as a wake-up call from apathy. That’s why Welsh nu-punks Manic Street Preachers declared that they hated Slowdive more than Hitler—for being so dreamily disengaged, advocates for reverie rather than revolution.
This anti-politics of vagueness comes through clearly on one of Still in a Dream’s more unusual and surprising inclusions, a lost classic that I would never have filed under shoegaze: AC Marias’s "One of Our Girls Has Gone Missing." AC is Angela Conway, an associate of Wire (whose Bruce Gilbert was involved in the sculpted-snow sound of "One of Our Girls," which ought to thrill anyone who loves Chairs Missing and 154.) Drawing on the John le Carré genre of ice-hearted espionage fiction and the idea of the agent who goes AWOL, Conway’s lyric imagines a strategy of dissidence through disappearance:"“She has lost her color/ And faded away/ Moved into thin air."
As a frontline journalist covering much of this music at the time, I recall that the '60s allegiances of shoegaze seemed obvious and paramount. They were harking back longingly to the '60s as a refusal of the '80s—the decade of Thatcher and Reagan. But that necessarily meant a return of '60s sounds without any of the hope or confident dynamism of that decade; change would not be coming, change in fact was being reversed. That’s one reason why the word "dream" was so emblematic of the era (Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation being only the most conspicuous example). Rather than turn dreams into reality, now it was more like dreaming your life away, assisted by recorded relics from that lost time. Rather than "we want the world and we want it now" (the Doors) or even "we’re all normal and we want our freedom" (Love), the spirit was crestfallen and crushed: "There’s a place I’d like to be/ There’s a place I’d be happy" (Galaxie 500’s "Tugboat"), or the murmured, barely audible "much rather be" in "All Different Things" by Bark Psychosis.
Listening today, though, the '60s-ness of shoegaze recedes to a surprising degree. Especially on the first disc—which includes shoegaze-spawning but not-really-shoegaze greats like Cocteau Twins, the House of Love, A.R. Kane—I don’t hear the Byrds or Velvets, I hear the glassy textures of John McGeoch, Vini Reilly, or Clive Timperley of the Passions (the glorious glistening echoplexed intro to "I’m in Love With a German Film Star"). Yes, the "ba ba-ba-ba ba" bit in "Christine" by the House of Love harks back to '60s pop of the Turtles type, but Terry Bickers' crystalline cascades are totally modern in their moment.
In other shoegaze groups, a surprisingly large amount of New Order and the Cure is discernible: the processional glide-rhythms, the high-toned droning basslines. Despite being swathed in prismatic guitar-miasma, Kitchens of Distinction sound like Modern English more than anything on "3rd Time We Opened the Capsule." Even with the overtly classicist outfits like Spacemen 3, for all the signposted allusions to the Velvets, Beach Boys, Stooges, and their refusal of '80s tropes (gated drums, Yamaha DX7 synth—i.e. the very things that groups like Haim now deliberately redeploy), a record like "Hypnotized" could only have been made at that particular time. If you placed it alongside records actually made in the '60s, it would jut out jarringly.
Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. The stricture of only one track per artist means that the inessential gets inevitably over-represented and the defining greats get short-changed and effectively demoted. A five-disc box set of shoegaze organized around quality and innovation as criteria would be about 1/3 My Bloody Valentine. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality. After that you get the influenced: the second and third waves, as well as fellow travelers (Cranes), outliers (Mercury Rev), and offshoots (Seefeel). Shrewdly, the compilers cut off in '95, and don’t attempt to corral any of the shoegaze homages or revivalists of the last 20 years.
I had a great time with the first disc (late '80s), a good time with the second and much of the third (lovely to remake the acquaintance of Moose and the muscular Swervedriver, who had a bit of Thin Lizzy in their make-up), but by the fourth, the trip down memory lane took on a purgatorial aspect. "More of the same, only slightly different" is good up to a point, but with any genre you can have too much of a good thing. Although primarily a UK genre—and in some way reflective of British character traits like diffidence—the Americans did join in: sometimes inventively warping the MBV blueprint (the blow-torched beauty of Medicine’s "Aruca") and other times cloning it (Swirlies). You can always quibble about choices (why "Rollercoaster" as opposed to two dozen other Jesus and Mary Chain candidates?!). But overall Still in a Dream is a job well done: an accurate portrait of an era that, while it can’t really be described as a lost golden age for rock, nonetheless provided sorely needed radiance and refuge during a particularly grim period.